Sitecritic.net Website Reviews – How can your website be improved?

Form

The home page is very important because it is usually the first landing page of your website. It is therefore important that the homepage must motivate your visitors to stay. I could already pick up alot of things by just glancing at the homepage of “Preferred Seating”. The 2 things that came into my mind immediately were a) The site has layout problems. b) They need to re-organize their content.

The first rule in designing any website is not to overwhelm your readers with tonnes of information. Too much information confuses your readers and makes your website boring. I feel that the author has alot of things to tell but is abit too impatient, displaying too much details in the home page.

There are alot of words in other pages well but many them are redundant. For example, when the author is describing church seatings, he need not tell long stories about how important comfort is to people in the church. Chair industry is quite specialized and does not have a wide appeal. People must have arrived at the site with a purpose. This means that they want to buy something and want to know what you have to offer. What is the point of beating around the bush? It might be a better idea though to talk more about the products in a separate window or let the user download pdf a file if they wish to know more.

I like to use the website of another furniture company, freedom.com.au to illustrate the importance of “Uncluttering Your Website”.

Function

Though the main navigation menu is easily identifiable, the submenu is not. The current submenu is sandwiched between some images and text, making it hard to detect. I would suggest some mouse over effects or even move the whole thing to the top. There are currently no links back to the home page and I do not know where I am. While surfing the site, I also realized some pages have alot of empty spaces that make you scroll for no reason.

I feel that the “Contact Us” link should not be the first item in the menu. People usually want to look at your products before contacting you. The company should also talk more about themselves. Information like how long they have been in the industry, their work philosophy, major projects, awards won…etc are good ideas.

I think the author needs to work alot harder on the images. The image on the right shows how a chair without a background looks better than one with a background. While browsing the entire site, I found that the layout is different in every pages. The inconsistency extends to the empty spaces around the images and text. Also, I cannot see how the blue line between the menu and content fits into the theme of the site. Instead of changing the images in the header for every page, I would suggest perhaps to leave the header with a fix image because some images are not cropped properly.

Many header text in the body are not aligned properly. The author might consider using CSS to provide custom alignment. To me, I feel that the page that set a better example should be

http://www.preferred-seating.com/html/Gym_Floor_Covering.htm.

I would strongly suggest the author to use the layout in this page as a guide(or template) for all the other webpages. The use of a template is very effective in generating consistent layout.

The coding needs a big fix as well and I think the main concern now should be on the design and layout. One of the big problems in designing website yourself is the generation of redundant codes which is very unhealthy in terms of search engine optimization.

Conclusion

The website has alot of nice content which needs to be manually filtered and organized for user-friendliness. The author has a long way to go if he wants to turn this website into something more presentable and marketable. I would suggest re-designing the website with some professional help.